Books: Meron Benvenisti's Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948

by Ilan Pappe

Mr. Pappe is professor of political science at Haifa University and academic head of the Institute for Peace Research, Givat Haviva.

Israeli Zionist intellectuals who are located on the most leftist
pole of the political spectrum continue to produce bizarre books
navigating carefully between self-criticism and justifications.
This is an intriguing genre, characterized by careful
deconstruction of the Zionist past and present, which was recently
exposed to its widest audience in the treatment of history in the
Israeli television series"Tekumma"--yet another intellectual
exercise of self-criticism without violating the basic Zionist
consensus. Meron Benvenisti's book is very much in this vein.
These books are very informative and full of intriguing facts
about callous Israeli behavior in the past, but they are wrapped
in Zionist ideology that leaves the question of Israel's moral
responsibility intact. Morality should be an integral part of
historical research, but it is not in these books in general, nor
is it to be found in the book under review. Nevertheless,
Benvenisti's book is somewhat exceptional in this respect because
he does not pretend to write a purely scholarly work. He is a
journalist and writes like one. Therefore, this is a book with a
clear, undisguised ideological agenda. This transparency makes it
a bit easier to examine the connection between what happened, the
author's interpretation, and the moral and political conclusions
driven from the historical analysis.

On the factual level, readers will find much in this work that is
novel. The book in essence looks at the way the Israelis
transformed the"human geography" of Palestine after the 1948
Nakba. It examines in detail the renaming of the land and its
human sites as part of the antirepatriation policy that Israel
adopted after the war. Benvenisti is one of the few Israelis who
dare to describe the policy pursued as"ethnic cleansing."
According to this book, the"ethnic cleansing included Hebrewizing
[sic] Arab names, the building of Jewish settlements over deserted
Arab villages, and the refusal to allow a collective return." The
worst episode in this operation was what the author calls"the
atrocities." These included massacres, rapes, and expulsions of
Palestinians, but, according to this book, these"atrocities" were
few in number and limited to the last phases of the war, around
October 1948.

At this point the readers will get the impression that this is an
explicit challenge not only to mainstream Israeli historiography,
but even to"new historians" such as Benny Morris. But it is not.
Admittedly, the term"ethnic cleansing" is provocative from a
Zionist point of view, but its explication in this book would lead
the average Zionist reader to exhale a sigh of relief. According
to Benvenisti's narrative, the cleansing was not premeditated, the
indigenous population was not expelled, and atrocities were on the
level one would expect from a"modern" nation in a conventional
war. The worst that is described is the takeover of the abandoned
villages and their resettlement by Jews. Indeed, if the"ethnic
cleansing" amounts to the renaming and resettling of uninhabited
villages, then the Israeli conduct sounds less ignominious in
retrospect.

The Nakba is presented here as loss of land and houses. Nothing is
mentioned about careers, normal life, cultural production-in
short, the brutal termination of human existence in one's own
land. The limits of the soul searching in this book emerge starkly
when one reads the author's political conclusions today in light
of his version of the"ethnic cleansing" of yesterday. The answer
to the question Quo vadis? is quite short:"What was lost needs a
tombstone." This is a distorted paraphrasing of a piece written by
Azmi Bishara and adopted wrongly by Benvenisti as the end of the
story. Bishara wants a tomb on the way to repatriation;
Benvenisti wishes for a tomb instead of repatriation.

After reading the book, one gets the impression that the Nakba was
a non-event. Benvenisti would have been right if all that had
happened in Palestine was destruction of villages and urban
centers in the aftermath of the war as part of an Israeli
antirepatriation policy. His remorse then would be respectful and
his call for forgetfulness reasonable. But the destruction of the
deserted villages pales in comparison to the real"ethnic
cleansing" not mentioned in even one word of this book. This is
the vision that Nur Masalha describes in his recent book Imperil
Israel. The destruction of deserted villages was a final act in a
plot written in the 1880s. Zionist ideology purported and
advocated the depopulation of Palestine. The contingency that
developed in 1948 enabled this movement to implement this old
desire to cleanse the indigenous population. Such heinous ideas
could have been legitimized in the eyes of liberal-minded
Europeans, such as the early Zionists, since this was the age of
colonialism, when genocide and ethnic cleansing were part of the
legitimate means for expanding European power into Asia and
Africa. The rise of the European Left in the 1920s and the decline
of the colonial powers after World War I almost brought to a stop
these acts of depopulation. Zionism was lagging behind because it
had to wait until it had the power to act, and it could not have
done so before 1948. It also would not have escaped the wrath of
the international community had it not been for the Holocaust
These last sentences, if accepted as reasonable analysis of
historical development, exclude their author from the Zionist
consensus. Benvenisti chooses to stay within it. To his credit,
one should say that he does not hide behind scientific truth to
claim the rightness of his position. It is difficult for him
emotionally to cross over to the non-Zionist bank of the river.